PBS : Empires : Queen Victoria : Her Majesty : Queen Victoria Portrait of Queen Victoria. The Royal Collection Windsor. Princess Alexandrina Victoria was not only born to be Queen of England: she was conceived to be Queen. Once Princess Charlotte, the only legitimate child of the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, died in childbirth late in 1817, her son stillborn, the nation was plunged into mourning and her unmarried uncles stirred into competition to sire an heir to the throne. With the Prince of Wales, Prince Regent for his insane father, George III, separated from the future (but uncrowned) Queen Caroline, no lawful successor would come that way. To solve the succession dilemma, the royal brothers, princes of the blood, most of them with mistresses and illegitimate progeny, were ordered to marry and beget, with their reward for success a promised cancellation of their heavy debts. Although William IV, the Duke of Clarence (1830-37), duly married a minor German princess, no child of his survived early infancy.

Next in line, Edward, Duke of Kent, would jettison his mistress of many years and marry the widowed Victoire, Duchess of Amorbach, who had proved her fertility during her first marriage. When she became pregnant, it became necessary, once she could travel, to leave her small German dukedom and give birth on English soil to establish unquestionable credentials for the child's likely inheritance. But beset by debt unresolved by the Regent, the Duke encountered delays in raising the money to get his entourage across the Channel. On 28 March 1819, in her eighth month, the Duchess set off, arriving at Dover on 24 April, barely in time for the accouchement. At Kensington Palace, in apartments reluctantly granted by the Regent, who disliked his improvident brother, the future queen was born on 24 May. The new princess was christened a month later, with none of the usual royal names available to her parents because of the Regent's refusal to permit another Charlotte or Elizabeth or Georgina.

Since the Russian tsar, Alexander I, was godfather in absentia, his name was available, and even as late as the morning of her accession, at eighteen, on June 20, 1837, the public was unsure of the official name of the new queen. She had always been known as Victoria, however, and was so proclaimed. Fatherless as an infant-her father had died on January 23, 1820, only six days before his own father, George III-she was dominated by her ambitious mother, who hoped for a Regency for herself if William IV died before Victoria's eighteenth birthday. Stubbornly, the ailing king held on just long enough for his niece to reign in her own right. But she proved wilful and difficult, creating embarrassments at Court that led her advisers, notably the avuncular Viscount Melbourne, the Prime Minister, to press her to marry. A husband might control her, and in any case the nation needed a guaranteed succession. Victoria's mother and her Coburg brothers arranged to keep the prospective marriage within the family.

Yet they were assisted by the dearth of acceptable Protestant candidates among European royals, some of whom the young Queen interviewed to her disappointment. Late in 1839, however, when she met Prince Albert, the younger son of her uncle Ernest, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, for only the second time (three years earlier he had been a callow teen-ager), she was smitten. A student at the University of Bonn, he was clearly her intellectual superior-and, she thought, beautiful. She proposed (he could not, as she was Queen), and they were married in February 1840. At first, Albert only wielded the blotting paper as she signed documents. He was uneasy about his lack of occupation and status; but he had been employed to ensure the succession. Biology thereafter ensured his role. When Victoria became so visibly pregnant that she could not appear ceremonially, Albert assumed her functions. Once she became heavy and listless, he also became, in effect, the senior partner (although five months her junior) in a dual monarchy.

After nine children through 1856, he had established himself as her primary adviser, often drafting memoranda that she recopied in her own hand and signed. Impressed by his abilities, the aging Duke of Wellington, eager to retire, even invited him to become chief of the army, but Albert, an honorary field marshal, resisted the temptation, explaining that he had to subsume his personality and his ambitions in the interests of the Queen. Portrait of young Queen Victoria. The Royal Collection Windsor. But for the period of the Crimean War (1853-54), when the couple, especially Albert, were suspected falsely of Russian sympathies, the dual monarchy worked efficiently. England in any case was evolving, after the first Reform Bill (1832), into a constitutional monarchy, with the sovereign's powers becoming more moral and symbolic than legislative. The authority of the throne now rested more and more in popular respect for its occupant. That situation ended abruptly when Albert, at 42 in December 1861, died of what was very likely stomach cancer.

His incompetent physicians called it typhoid, but no other cases existed in the area, rendering that diagnosis suspect, and although Victoria knew nothing of his long-standing symptoms, and was prostrated by his death, Albert was aware that he had been suffering from something inoperable. The Prince Consort's death altered the monarchy irreparably. Victoria was inconsolable, out of shock, out of loss, and out of her realization that she had depended so long upon Albert's advice and support that she was unsure she could be sovereign alone. She went into purdah, for years failing to perform even her ceremonial functions on grounds that she was in perpetual mourning. The monarchy accordingly declined in authority and in esteem, and public perception was summed up by a cartoon in the press that showed the royal robes draped over an empty throne. Twenty at Albert's death-the same age as were Victoria and Albert at their marriage, Albert Edward ("Bertie"), the Prince of Wales was given no compensatory duties to fill some of the void left by his father's death and his mother's disappearance into grief.

Just before his father's last illness the young prince had been discovered in a liaison with a lady of the evening, and Victoria believed that the shock and the potential scandal had led to Albert's decline. Bertie was pronounced as unfit to be king, and unfit to assume any national role. Bertie's lack of anything to do, and his incapacity to invent serious work for himself led to his life as playboy prince, despite a marriage that was supposed to settle him down. (Alexandra was beautiful but brainless, with no ability to rein in her husband.) His increasing notoriety as "Edward the Caresser" (in Henry James's phrase) and Victoria's invisibility as sovereign would lead to a decade of republican agitation that ended fortuitously in 1871 when Bertie came down with authentic typhoid fever, and nearly died. The weeks of public agitation over his possible demise, and his seemingly miraculous recovery, exploded the thin but widespread anti-monarchical sentiment in Britain.

It did not make the Prince more moral or even more circumspect, but the second ministry of Benjamin Disraeli beginning in 1874 engineered the rehabilitation of the throne by drawing the queen back into public life and in finding acceptable roles for her heir. Victoria and Albert. The Royal Collection Windsor. The costly Indian Mutiny in 1856-57 had led to reorganization of imperial rule in the subcontinent, and on Victoria's return to visibility in the 1870s she began to yearn for a title that would prevent her eldest daughter, Vicky, married to the heir to the German throne, from-as empress--outranking her proud mother. The Queen wanted to be Empress of India, and as part of the price for her increasing public role pressed Disraeli into arranging an imperial title representing the jewel in her crown. At about the same time, the Prince of Wales, eager for a junket to India with his cronies, to hunt elephants and tigers, convinced the Prime Minister to arrange a royal tour.

Despite all likelihood that the princely progress would be a disaster, it was a triumph, demonstrating Bertie's diplomatic and impresario qualities, which he would employ with brio thereafter. As he was embarking home, news arrived that the Queen had indeed been styled Empress of India. Fortunately for the Queen's reputation, her Scots manservant John Brown had died early in 1883. For Victoria, Brown's much-lamented passing severed a link with Albert in life and in death. He had been the Prince's gillie, and to extricate the Queen from self-imposed purdah her doctors recommended importing Brown from Balmoral to care for her personal horses and get her out riding. The gruff, bearded Scot became her favorite, accompanying her publicly almost everywhere. He also become a barrier -- as she wanted -- to intrusions from staff, and even from her children. (They despised him.) He sat in on table-turning seances in that heyday of spiritualism to help summon up a very dubious hint of the Prince.

She despised smoking but Brown could appear before her in a haze of tobacco, and often tipsy as well with whiskey -- and he taught Victoria how to put a nip of Scotch in her tea. Class vanished. In an age of sentimental effusions, she sent him valentines by post, and awarded him a special medal for loyal service to the Queen. Rumor had it that he was sexually intimate with her, even that they were secretly married, and in 1869 a scandal sheet claimed that the Queen (in her 50th year) had gone to Switzerland to covertly bear his child. Her very openness about Brown belied such intimacies, but without a husband to embrace she seems to have savored being clutched by him as he helped on and off her horses, and in and out of her carriages. When he was dying, protocol forbade her to visit him (contrary to an episode in the film "Mrs. Brown"), and in any event a fall had lamed one of her knees, and she could not have climbed stairs to his quarters.

"If he had been a more ambitious man," said Sir William Knollys, the Prince of Wales's comptroller, of Brown, "there is no doubt . . . he might have meddled in more important matters. I presume the family will rejoice at his death, but I think very probably they are shortsighted." Yet Brown's disappearance from the Victorian scene helped restore the Queen's public image. She could better embody middle-class values and become the symbolic mother of her country. Victoria's Funeral Pathe The 1880s and 1890s were decades of Victoria's increasing visibility as symbol of Britain and of Empire, as-with the Prince of Wales often acting as impresario-she celebrated her Golden Jubilee as Queen, and then, turning it into an imperial festival, she marked her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. She had become an icon of Empire, ironically just as the Anglo-Boer War was about to erupt in South Africa, adding to the red areas on the globe but embarrassing the nation by showing how difficult it was to win and control colonies in a dawning age of nationalism.

In her waning years, Victoria, calling herself a soldier's daughter, went out, although wheelchair-bound by age and frailty, to bid departing troops godspeed. The war was still ongoing when, incapacitated by a series of small strokes, she died in January 1901, the first month of the new century. But Victoria's world of simple values and simple loyalties, and her rigid view of the Crown, had preceded her in death. Loading Page... Queen Victoria Queen Victoria ▼ Primary Sources ▼ Queen Victoria Alexandrina Victoria, the only child of Edward, Duke of Kent and Victoria Maria Louisa of Saxe-Coburg, was born in 24th May 1819. The Duke of Kent was the fourth son of George III and Victoria Maria Louisa was the sister of King Leopold of Belgium. The Duke and Duchess of Kent selected the name Victoria but her uncle, George IV , insisted that she be named Alexandrina after her godfather, Tsar Alexander II of Russia . Victoria's father died when she was eight months old. The Duchess of Kent developed a close relationship with Sir John Conroy, an ambitious Irish officer.

Conroy acted as if Victoria was his daughter and had a major influence over her as a child. On the death of George IV in 1830, his brother William IV became king. William had no surviving legitimate children and soVictoria, became his heir. William's health was not good and he feared that Conroy would become the power behind the throne if Victoria became queen before she was eighteen. William IV died 27 days after Victoria's eighteenth birthday. Although William was unaware of this, Victoria disliked Conroy and she had objected to his attempt to exert power over her. As soon as she became queen in 1837, Victoria banished Conroy from the Royal Court. Lord Melbourne was Prime Minister when Victoria became queen. Melbourne was fifty-eight and a widower. Melbourne's only child had died and he treated Victoria like his daughter. Queen Victoria grew very fond of Melbourne and became very dependent on him for political advice. Melbourne was leader of the Whig party and although radical in his youth, his views were now extremely conservative. Melbourne had been a member of Earl Grey's government that had passed the 1832 Reform Act , but he had privately been against the measure.

Melbourne attempted to protect Victoria from the harsh realities of British life and even advised her not to read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens because it dealt with "paupers, criminals and other unpleasant subjects". Queen Victoria and Melbourne became very close. An apartment was made available for Lord Melbourne at Windsor Castle and it was estimated that he spent six hours a day with the queen. Victoria's feelings for Melbourne were clearly expressed in her journal. On one occasion she wrote: "he is such an honest, good kind-hearted man and is my friend, I know it." Some people objected to this close relationship. When on royal visits, some members of the crowd would shout out "Mrs. Melbourne". Lord Melbourne's old friend, Thomas Barnes , the editor of The Times wrote "Is it for the Queen's service - is it for the Queen's dignity - is it becoming - is it commonly decent?" In the autumn of 1837 a rumour circulated that Victoria was considering marrying Lord Melbourne . Queen Victoria wrote in her diary that she was growing very fond of Melbourne and loved listening to him talk: "Such stories of knowledge; such a wonderful memory; he knows about everybody and everything; who they were and what they did.

He has such a kind and agreeable manner; he does me the world of good." In 1839 Lord Melbourne resigned after a defeat in the House of Commons . Sir Robert Peel , the Tory leader, now became Prime Minister. It was the custom for the Queen's ladies of the bedchamber to be of the same political party as the government. Peel asked Victoria to replace the Whig ladies with Tory ladies. When Victoria refused, Peel resigned and Melbourne and the Whigs returned to office. Soon after the return of Lord Melbourne as Prime Minister, Victoria saw Lady Flora Hastings, one of her ladies-in-waiting, getting into a carriage with Sir John Conroy. A few months later Victoria noticed that Lady Hastings appeared to be pregnant. When Victoria approached Lady Hastings about this she claimed that she was still a virgin and had not had a sexual relationship with Conroy. Victoria refused to believe her and insisted that she submitted to a medical examination. The queen's doctor discovered that Lady Hastings was indeed a virgin and that the swelling was caused by a cancerous growth on the liver. The story was leaked to the newspapers and when Lady Hastings died of cancer a few months later, Victoria became very unpopular with the British public.

Soon afterwards an attempt was made to kill Victoria while she was driving in her carriage in London. Further assassination attempts took place in 1842 (twice), 1849, 1850, 1872 and 1882. Queen Victoria's cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg , visited London in 1839. Victoria immediately fell in love with Albert and although he initially had doubts about the relationship, the couple were eventually married in February 1840. During the next eighteen years Queen Victoria gave birth to nine children. Lord Melbourne resigned as Prime Minister in 1841. However, by this time, it was Prince Albert , rather than Melbourne, who had become the main influence over Victoria's political views. Whereas Melbourne had advised Victoria not to think about social problems, Prince Albert invited Lord Ashley to Buckingham Palace to talk about what he had discovered about child labour in Britain. Queen Victoria had a good relationship with the next two prime ministers, Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell . However, she disapproved of Lord Palmerston , the Foreign Secretary.

Palmerston believed the main objective of the government's foreign policy should be to increase Britain's power in the world. This sometimes involved adopting policies that embarrassed and weakened foreign governments. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert , on the other hand, believed that the British government should do what it could to help preserve European royal families against revolutionary groups advocating republicanism. This was very important to Victoria and Albert as they were closely related to several of the European royal families that faced the danger of being overthrown. Victoria and Albert also objected to Palmerston's sexual behaviour. On one occasion he had attempted to seduce one of Victoria's ladies in waiting. Palmerston entered Lady Dacre's bedroom while staying as Queen Victoria's guest at Windsor Castle. Only Lord Melbourne's intervention saved Palmerston from being removed from office. In the summer of 1850 Queen Victoria asked Lord John Russell to dismiss Palmerston. Russell told the queen he was unable to do this because Palmerston was very popular in the House of Commons. However, in December 1851, Lord Palmerston congratulated Louis Napoleon Bonaparte on his coup in France.

This action upset Russell and other radical members of the Whig party and this time he accepted Victoria's advice and sacked Palmerston. Six weeks later Palmerston took revenge by helping to bring down Lord John Russell's government. In 1855 Lord Palmerston became Prime Minister. Queen Victoria found it difficult to work with him but their relationship gradually improved. When Palmerston died she wrote in her journal: "We had, God knows! terrible trouble with him about Foreign Affairs. Still, as Prime Minister he managed affairs at home well, and behaved to me well. But I never liked him." Prince Albert died of typhoid fever in December 1861. Victoria continued to carry out her constitutional duties such as reading all diplomatic despatches. However, she completely withdrew from public view and now spent most of her time in the Scottish Highlands at her home at Balmoral Castle. Victoria even refused requests from her government to open Parliament in person. Politicians began to question whether Victoria was earning the money that the State paid her. While at Balmoral Queen Victoria became very close to John Brown, a Scottish servant. Victoria's friendship with Brown caused some concern and rumours began to circulate that the two had secretly married.

Hostility towards Victoria increased and some Radical MPs even spoke in favour of abolishing the British monarchy and replacing it with a republic. In 1868 William Gladstone , leader of the Liberals in the House of Commons , became Prime Minister. Gladstone's government had plans for a series of reforms including the extension of the franchise, elections by secret ballot and a reduction in the power of the House of Lords. Victoria totally disagreed with these policies but did not have the power to stop Gladstone's government from passing the 1872 Secret Ballot Act . In 1874 the Tory, Benjamin Disraeli , became Prime Minister. Victoria much preferred Disraeli's conservatism to Gladstone's liberalism. Victoria also approved of Disraeli's charm. Disraeli later remarked that: "Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel." Queen Victoria was very upset when Gladstone replaced Disraeli as premier in 1880. When Disraeli died the following year, Victoria wrote to his private secretary that she was devastated by the news and could not stop crying. Gladstone's relationship with Victoria failed to improve.

As well as her objection to the 1884 Reform Act , Victoria disagreed with Gladstone's foreign policy. William Gladstone believed that Britain should never support a cause that was morally wrong. Victoria took the view that not to pursue Britain's best interest was not only misguided, but close to treachery. In 1885 Victoria sent a telegram to Gladstone criticizing his failure to take action to save General Gordon at Khartoum. Gladstone was furious because the telegram was uncoded and delivered by a local station-master. As a result of this telegram it became public knowledge that Victoria disapproved of Gladstone's foreign policy. The relationship became even more strained when Gladstone discovered that Victoria was passing on confidential documents to the Marquess of Salisbury , the leader of the Conservatives . In 1885 the Marquess of Salisbury became Prime Minister. He was to remain in power for twelve of the last fifteen years of her reign. Victoria shared Salisbury's imperialist views and was thrilled when General Kitchener was successful in avenging General Gordon in the Sudan in 1898. Victoria also enthusiastically supported British action against the Boers in South Africa.

Queen Victoria died at her house on the Isle of Wight on 22nd January 1901. Queen Victoria | Information Facts Summary Queen Victoria’s Childhood By M. Foster Farley The plump toddler watering the flowers in the garden of her home at Kensington Palace was to overcome her early difficulties to become Britian’s great Queen-Empress. The name “Queen Victoria” conjures up a picture of a small, plump old lady in a black gown and lace cap, querulous and exacting, “not amused” at the antics of the younger generation, yearning always to be reunited by death with her dear departed Albert. It is hard to visualise her as a child. Yet, of course, she was once young and not always the formidable matriarch and magnificent Queen-Empress of popular legend. In fact, her childhood did not really end until she was 18 years old, when she succeeded to the throne. Victoria was born on a bright spring day, 24th May 1819, at Kensington Palace, in the then quiet suburb of London.

“Plumb as a partridge” was her father’s description of the baby, and she certainly bore a marked resemblance to her sturdy and robust Hanoverian ancestors who had ruled Great Britain for little more than a century at the time of her birth. By 1798 Victoria’s grandfather, King George III, had reigned for nearly sixty years, but he was now old and ailing. The symptoms of his terrible illness, porphyria, seemed to his doctors to be those of madness, and for years the King had be confined in Windsor Castle while his eldest son, George, Prince of Wales, ruled in his stead. Victoria’s father, Edward, Duke of Kent, was the old King’s fourth son, but since his three elder brothers were without heirs, there seemed a good chance that he might one day himself become King. He had married late in life, when he was over 50, to supply an heir to the throne in the younger generation. Between the seven princes and five princesses of the royal family, not one of them had a legitimate child to carry on the succession, until 1819 saw three royal births within two months.

The Prince of Wales had one child, the Princess Charlotte, who in time would have become Queen, but she died in childbirth in the autumn of 1817. It was her death which drove her uncles into marriage, to beget heirs to replace her in the line of succession. Indirectly, Charlotte herself had found her uncle Edward his bride: the Princess had married a minor German princeling, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and, deeply in love with him, suggested to the Duke of Kent that he would find an amiable wife in Leopold’s widowed sister, Victoire. In fact, Edward and Victoire met in 1816, but then there seemed no urgency in the matter of their marriage, and there were too many difficulties in the way at the time for the Duke of Kent to urge his suit — not the least of them being that he was perfectly happy with his French mistress of some quarter of a century’s standing. But soon after Charlotte’s death, Edward proposed to Victoire, and the couple were married the following summer.

Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld was 31 years old when she married the English Duke, a pretty woman with dark hair and sparking eyes, with a fine figure and lively ways. A German Princess of ancient lineage but little fortune, she had been first married at the age of 17 to Prince Emich Charles of Leiningren, a widower in his late thirties. Together they had weathered the storms of the Napoleonic invasions of Germany, their tiny principality impoverished by the wars. Emich Charles died only a few months after the first defeat of Napoleon, in 1814, leaving his widow with two small children and the manifold demands of noblesse oblige to tax her wits and strength. Her marriage with the Duke of Kent seemed to promise Victoire a brighter future, taking her away from her narrow existence in the village of Amorbach, with its careful economies and restricted social life, into one of the leading Courts of Europe, with the chance of one day becoming a queen.

In the summer of 1818 Edward brought his bride to England, but then, after a few heady months in London “society”, it was back to Amorbach and the familiar daily round, for the Duke was so burdened with debts that he could not afford to keep up appearances as a royal personage in England. But he was determined that his child should be born in his native land, and by dint of borrowing from his long-suffering friends, he managed to bring his wife back to England in time for the baby’s birth. Edward was not disappointed that the baby was a girl and not the long-hoped-for male heir: “I am decidedly of the opinion that the decrees of Providence are at all times the wisest and the best,” he wrote to a friend. A month after her birth, the Kent baby was baptised. After much debate in the royal family — in which not a little ill-feeling was aroused, she was named “Alexandrina Victoria”, after her chief godfather, the Russian Tsar Alexander, and her mother. The name “Victoria: was then completely unknown in England, though it had long been in use in the forms “Victoire” and “Victoria” on the Continent.

For the first few years the child was known as “Drina”, but in one of her first copy-books is limned the name “Victoria” by which she came to be known in later childhood. Despite the fact that the Kents had married “for convenience” their union proved remarkably happy. Edward had never known the comforts of a settled home in England, nor had he ever enjoyed so much approval from his family as this new domesticity brought. For Victoire, the change in her circumstances was delightful: with her new baby, and with a husband who doted on her, she was well content. Unfortunately, however, this happy state of affairs did not last long. The family moved down to Sidmouth in Devon in December 1819, and there, on 23rd January 1820, Edward, Duke of Kent, suddenly died. He, who had no serious illness in his life, caught a cold and took no special care of himself, so that it turned to pneumonia. In abject grief and almost penniless, the widowed Duchess allowed her brother Leopold to make all the arrangements for her return to London.

For months she remained in seclusion, at Kensington or at Leopold’s house at Claremont in Surrey. It was a testing-time for too, in that she had to decide whether to return to the familiar German countryside which had been her home for any or to remain in England, where she was still a comparative stranger. But the fact that her baby was now third in line to the throne (for George III had died only days after his son Edward) steeled her to her duty: for the sake of the baby’s future inheritance, she would stay in England and bring up her child as an Englishwoman, ready to succeed to the throne. The new King George IV had had very little affection for his late brother, so unlike him in character and principles, and he was not enamoured of the idea of having to contribute to the support of his widowed sister-in-law. Fortunately for Victoire, she had her own brother Leopold at hand, for he had decided to make his home in England after the death of his wife Charlotte, and out of his own allowance he provided most of the Duchess’s income. Many years later, Queen Victoria gathered together her earliest memories.

Her infancy was people with kind faces: her mother, always anxious and prudent for the child’s health; her half-sister Feodora, ten years her senior but her constant companion; old Baroness Spath, the Duchess’s German lady-in-waiting; the adoring nurse Mrs. Brock, replaced when Victoria was 4 years old by Fraulein Lehzen, Feodora’s governess. There were numerous aunts and uncles of the Royal family: her favourites were kind Aunt Adelaide, Duchess of Clarence, and her bluff husband William, struggling to hold back, in polite company, those rough seamen’s oath which he had learned in his roistering youth, as well as the devoted Uncle Leopold from Germany. On the other hand, there was “Uncle Sussex” who lived next door and who, it was always threatened, would be angry if his niece’s raised voice reached his ears; and the sinister “Uncle Cumberland”, next in line to the throne after the little Victoria, who, it was rumoured, was not incapable of “removing” so irritating a small rival to his aspirations to the crown.

“We lived in a very plain manner”, reminisced the Queen later, “breakfast was at half past eight, luncheon at half past one, dinner at seven – to which I came generally (when it was not regular large dinner-party) — eating my bread and milk out of a small silver basin. Tea was only allowed as a great treat in my later years.” A few pen-pictures of the young Victoria were written by contemporaries: the plump toddler attempting to water the flowers in the Palace gardens but pouring most of the contents of her watering-can over her shoes; a straight backed infant atop an ambling donkey, with a sweet-faced elder sister to guide her; a solemn little girl at church at Esher, so wrapped in her own thoughts that she failed to notice the threatening bumble-bee buzzing inside the rim of her bonnet. Victoria was no model child. She had her fair share of the royal temper, screaming and stamping when she was crossed, throwing a pair of scissors at Lehzen in a right royal rage. “When you are naughty, you make me and yourself very unhappy,” her mother rebuked her on one occasion.

“No, Mamma,” corrected the child, “not me, mot myself, but you!” All her life the future Queen would be stubborn and obstinate, but when she became calm after an uncontrolled fit of temper, she would always be contrite and wheedling for forgiveness. She was bright enough, quick at her lessons and shrewd in personal relationships: when her uncle George IV whisked her off to hear the band at Windsor one day, and gave her choice of a “number”, the artful child requested “God Save the King”. But Queen Victoria’s childhood was not idyllic by any means. As she grew up, she came to realise how narrow the circle admitted to Kensington Palace; she agreed with her half-sister that only at Claremont, on their holiday, had she been completely happy. The darkest shadow over her young life was one John Conroy, the Comptroller of the Duchess’s household at Kensington and the virtual controller of all the Duchess’s attitudes and aspirations. Conroy had been the Duke of Kent’s aid-de-camp, a military man who made more success of his social studies than he ever had of active service.

He was a flamboyantly good-looking Irishman, possessed of an ample measure of charm and an overweening ambition. The Duchess of Kent was no simpleton, but she was used to having her life ruled by men and could not accustom herself to having to make independent decisions. A better guide would have been her brother Leopold but, he, after a few years of carefully supervision of his sister’s affairs, took a mistress of whom she could not approve, which drove a wedge between them; then, as he tired of inactivity in England, he began to travel abroad more frequently. Finally, in 1831, he departed permanently to take up the crown of the newly-created kingdom of Belgium. Left alone in England, daunted by her responsibility as mother of a future Queen, Victoire of Kent relied increasingly on the soothing blandishments of her Comptroller. It was Conroy who insisted that Victoria should be strictly guarded, playing on her mother’s fear of a fatal “accident” at the hands of the Duke of Cumberland.

It was Conroy who urged a suitable match for Feodora with a German prince, when it seemed likely that the widower King George IV himself might offer for her hand (thus snatching the little Victoria’s chance of a crown by begetting heirs of his own). Conroy could see himself as the chief adviser to the future Queen Victoria, the father-figure who would be the girls éminence grise, the “power behind the throne” of her reign, and he did all he could to prepare his glorious future. Having made himself indispensable to the Duchess by his administration of her household and his advice to her as to the care of her child was not averse to a little more personal interest too: Conroy, a married man, never became the Duchess’s lover — she was far to circumspect and he was far too fearful of scandal for such a situation to develop, but he knew hot to make himself agreeable to a lonely widow. The child Victoria once witnessed “some familiarities” between her mother and Conroy and prattled of them to lady-in-waiting Spath.

When the horrified Baroness rebuked her mistress, she received short shrift and was sent packing by Conroy, of course, to the safe distance of Feodora’s new home in Germany. Sir John could not risk malicious gossip: if it were ever thought that the Duchess of Kent was an unfit moral influence on her daughter, the child might be swept off to other guardians. In 1827, the heir to the throne, the Duke of York, died, followed in 1830 by his brother King George IV. Now only the frail life of King William IV, already in his sixties, stood between the Princess Victoria and the Throne. By 1830 the Duchess of Kent — or rather, Conroy — had plans already in train in case the princess should succeed while still a minor. By proving to an invited committee of prelates that her child was well grounded in her education and religion, the Duchess of Kent won wide approval; it was a short step to gaining recognition, a few months later that she, Victoire, should be her daughter’s regent should Victoria come to the throne before she reached the age of eighteen.

In fact, by the modern standards of royal training, Victoria’s education was somewhat deficient. Lehzen, and the visiting tutors who were brought in, gave the child a good grounding in English, French and German (though her Latin, which she began at 8 years old, never progressed very far). More interesting to the Princess were her music and dancing lessons, and she actually chose to learn Italian from her passion for the Italian opera. Her reading in history, however, was prodigious: at 15 she was immersed in Clarendon’s dry History of the Rebellion and Sully’s Memoirs, so that though she was taught no political theory or philosophy, Victoria came to have a good appreciation of the mistakes and achievements of past rulers. Apart from her tutors, Victoria’s contacts with the outside world were few in her early years. Conroy induced the Duchess of Kent to discourage visits from the royal family, who might, he feared, either woo Victoria’s affections away from her mother or enquire too closely of his own influence.

Occasionally, the Princess might be allowed to attend a children’s ball or a little girl might be brought in to play with her (“You must not touch those, they are mine,” declared the Princess to a child who wanted to play with the royal toys, “and I may call you Jane, but you must not call me Victoria!”) but usually she had only the company of the Conroy girls, Jane and Victoire, and so much had she come to hate their father that they never became her friends. How soon Victoria realised how baneful was the influence of Sir John Conroy in her life is hard to say. But certainly, once she had come to realise her own significance and her destiny, it would not be too difficult for even a child to see through his wiles. It has often been affirmed that she never knew for years that she would one day be Queen, and did not understand why men stared at her in the Park, sweeping off their hats and bowing.

If so, there could well be a good deal of truth in the oft-told story of Lehzen’s slipping a family tree of the royal dynasty into the child’s history book in 1830: when Victoria realised the significance of her own place in the royal family, she pondered “I am nearer to the throne than I thought.” Then she said the memorable words, “I will be good.” As presumptive heir to William IV from 1830, Victoria became an important personage in the Kingdom. Her mother (that is, Conroy) was careful to keep the Princess’s name totally disassociated from that of the King; while William IV was reviled throughout the nation for his opposition to the Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832, the Duchess, via Conroy, courted the Radical and Whig politicians of the Opposition. While stones were thrown at the royal carriage in London streets, Victoire and Victoria were everywhere cheered as they made a summer “progress” through the provinces. As these journeys continued, every summer, the King became increasingly resentful. In petty spite, he forbade the firing of gun salutes at the appearances of his niece and her mother.

At first Victoria found these journeys enthralling, a wonderful escape from Kensington. When she first left London for a tour of Wales in 1982, she began a journal in a book which the Duchess had given her. So fascinating was the coach ride and so tempting the blank pages of the diary that for the first few days she would record the exact time of her arrival and departure at the stages along the route: “Twenty minutes to nine. We have just changed horses at Barnet, a very pretty little town. Five minutes past half past nine. We have just changed horses at St. Albans. The situation is very pretty and there is a beautiful old abbey there. Five minutes past ten. The country is beautiful here: they have begun to cut the corn; it is so golden and fine that I think they will have a good harvest . . . A quarter to eleven. We have just changed horses at Dunstable . . .” With these naive beginnings, the future Queen instituted the great disciplined life-work of her journals, in which, for the first time, a British monarch recorded conversations, impressions and feelings to the eternal benefit of her biographers. But by 1835 the strenuous journeys had lost their appeal.

Conroy had planned a series of visits to the great houses of the aristocrats very much to the advantage of the Duchess’s popularity. Victoria balked at the idea. So violent was the quarrel between the Princess and her mother over this issue that the Duchess had to resort to writing a letter to her daughter, for she could not control her anger in conversation. She demanded that Victoria recognise her responsibilities to show herself to “the people”: “I must tell you, dearest love, if your conversation with me could be know, that you had not the energy to undertake the journey, or that your views were not enlarged enough to grasp the benefits arising from it, then you would fall in the estimation of the people in this country.” Victoria conceded the victory, but throughout the “progress” she complained vehemently of head-ache and back-ache and other ailments. Only a few weeks after the family settled at Ramsgate to recuperate from the journey, Victoria fell really ill, most probably of a severe case of tonsillitis. Having recovered from a fever, she was still very week for more than a month, losing a good deal of weight and continually complaining of cold, through bad circulation.

Sir John Conroy was not the man to miss such a chance of taking advantage of the girl’s debility. The Princess’ antipathy to him was becoming ever more apparent, and he had by then given up the hope of obtaining future power through her affections. While Victoria was still weak from her illness, he put before her the demand that he should become her secretary when she succeeded to the throne. He actually produced a document for her to sign, binding her to the promise. Victoria firmly resisted. Despite her physical frailty, she had the strength of her hatred of Sir John to give her resolution. At the same time, she had the encouragement of Baroness Lehzen, her governess, who was always her ally against Conroy. For years this woman had attempted to shield her charge from him and to open the Princess’s eyes to the scope of his enormities. Despite Lehzen’s power over Victoria, which was grounded on sincere affection and bulwarked on common cause against the enemy, Conroy dare not act against the governess, to oust her as he had the lady-in-waiting Spath.

He knew only too well that Lehzen enjoyed the confidence of both King William IV and King Leopold of the Belgians, the Duchess’s brother. Infuriated by this impotence, he only made matters worst by continually sniping at Lehzen in Victoria’s presence. Nevertheless, the girl’s life was not completely unhappy, and for quite long periods Kensington Palace could be free of raised voices and sudden bursts of tears. Victoria would spend many quiet hours with Lehzen, dressing her large collection of dolls as characters from history or fabricating tiny trinket boxes from odds and ends of silk and coloured beads. There was a stream of letters from Feodora to cheer Victoria, with news of her growing family, or the screeds of advice from her Uncle Leopold, who fancied himself as mentor to the future Queen. Although the Duchess had not encouraged visits from her own German family in the early years, she had made sure that Victoria learned a large measure of devotion to her unseen aunts and uncles to make up for her deprivation of closer ties.

When the Princess was in her early teens, several of the German relations were invited to Kensington Palace, including, in the summer of 1836, her cousins Ernest and Albert, sons of Victoire’s eldest brother, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Victoria was open to teenage enthusiasms (for years she went into raptures of the singing of the young and beautiful Giulia Grisi, who sang her favourite Italian operas so well) and she threw herself whole-heartedly into entertaining her cousins and could not sufficiently praise their looks and accomplishments. However, King William was not so rapturous. He had dark suspicions that the Duchess, or the King of the Belgians (whom he had never liked), was angling for a Coburg match for Victoria, which was certainly not to his tastes. His reception of the Prince of Orange and his eligible sons was timed to coincide with that of the Coburgs. For once, Victoria did not side with her English uncle against her mother, and she assured her Uncle Leopold that Ernest and Albert were perfectly to her taste while the Oranges were detestable.

By the middle of the 1836, relations between the King and his sister-in-law were at breaking point. Matters came to a head in August when William IV openly insulted the Duchess at a public dinner in honour of his birthday: “I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer [when Victoria would gain her majority], after which period, in the event of my death, no regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that young lady . . . the heiress presumptive of the crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me [Victoire], who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed.” It was a bombshell. From that moment Conroy became desperate — and Victoria more resolute. Recognising that the future Queen would never willingly allow in him any power in her future government, Sir John began to make out a case for her unworthiness to govern and need for guardians. He was forever harping on her emotional instability and inciting her mother repeatedly to draw attention to her faults.

But though the Princess was certainly unbalanced in her emotions after such years of strain at home, she was by no means unfit to rule. And above all, she had the will to do her duty, to “be good.” On 24th May 1837 Victoria celebrated her 18th birthday. At last she was free of the impending regency. But she had had a narrow escape: by that date her Uncle William was already close to death. Conroy panicked. In the last days of William IV’s life, he stepped up his campaign. He tried to convince Lords Liverpool and Melbourne, the leading politicians of the day, that Victoria was totally unfit to govern — but they were not taken in. He put pressure on the Duchess of Kent and her son Charles of Leiningren, Victoria’s half-brother, to force the Princess into signing away her independence. But already it was too late. King Leopold, realising now how precarious was his niece’s position, sent over his own trusted adviser, Baron Stockmar, both to report to him on the situation and to attempt to hold it in check. At last Conroy ruined everything.

He told the Duchess, “if Princess Victoria will not listen to reason, she must be coerced.” Victoire was already becoming apprehensive: realising that she had lost her daughter’s trust, she was now hesitant to take any more drastic measures. Even Charles Leiningen, formerly a pawn of Conroy’s by his reliance on financial loans, saw that Sir John had gone too far and advised his mother not to obey him. For the last few days of King William’s life, Kensington was in a state of uneasy truce. At 6 o’clock on the morning of 20th June 1837 the Duchess of Kent woke her daughter with the news that William IV was dead. All her life Victoria had been used to receiving visitors in the company of her mother; now, for the first time, she went alone into the room where the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain were waiting. All through that day of mixed grief and triumph, Victoria undertook her first duties alone, emphasising that word in her account of the day in her journal with immense relish. That night, for the first time, she did not sleep in her mother’s bedroom. Victoria was no longer a child.

She was now a woman and a Queen. All her accounts were paid in full: Lehzen became her closest attendant, remaining her confidante; her mother, though treated with deference in public, was shunned at home — often, in reply to the Duchess’s request to see her daughter, Victoria would send a note with the one word “Busy”; Conroy was forbidden access to the Queen’s private rooms at Buckingham Palace. In the years to come, it was obvious to courtiers that Victoria had more regard for her former governess than for her mother, for the Duchess would complain of such treatment to all who would listen. Conroy stayed in her service and, in 1839, was involved in a scandal at Court which seriously threatened the Queen’s popularity in the country. It was suspected that he had made a young lady-in-waiting pregnant: Victoria hounded the unfortunate woman mercilessly — though in fact Lady Flora Hastings, an old enemy from Kensington days, was suffering from an incurable illness which merely gave her body the appearance of pregnancy. The ensuing furore gave Victoria’s advisers a chance to press for Conroy’s resignation.

It was to be many years, however, before the Duchess of Kent regained her daughter’s affection. When the Queen married her Coburg cousin Albert, in 1840, Victoire mourned that now she would never be “all in all” to her daughter. But gradually with her new emotional balance, Victoria would look more kindly on her mother and recognise the good intentions which had prompted her to such unwitting former unkindness. As a doting grandmother, the Duchess found her ideal role, and one which her daughter could grant without loss of dignity. By the time of her death in 1861, Victoire had Victoria’s complete devotion. The Queen mourned her mother in typically hysterical fashion, bitterly regretting the years of their estrangement. Many Kings and Queens of England have had unhappier childhoods than Victoria; Elizabeth I, for example, when she was repudiated by her father and left to live in poverty, when she first learned to fear the headsman’s axe and the marriage-bed; or Charles II, amid war and political intrigues, with fears for his life at the hands of his father’s enemies.

Perhaps it is a prerequisite of a great monarch to have a previous tempering in the fires of adversity. Victoria’s early misfortune certainly did not mar her suitability for the throne. [tabby title=’More Queen Victoria Articles’][srp widget_title=”Queen Victoria Articles” widget_css_id=”testing-grid” post_type=”post” post_content_type=”content” post_content_length=”50″ post_content_length_mode=”words” post_title_length=”12″ post_title_length_mode=”words” post_date=”no” category_include=”148″ post_offset=”2″ string_break=” More…” layout_mode=”multi_column” srp post_limit=”200″ display_thumbnail=”no” vf_everything=”no”][tabbyending] Copyright 2014 British Heritage.

Question: Which title was held by the father of Queen Victoria?
Answer: Duke of Kent